There's a lot in today's papers about the conviction of Mehmet Goren for the "honour killing" of his teenage daughter Tulay, thanks in large measure to the courageous testimony of the victim's mother.

Good. Like many of the nastier practices justified in the name or one or other of the world's great religions, "honour killing" has no basis in theology and is unusually horrible. Let's help stamp it out where we can.

But my focus here is on the other end of the family honour market – the permissive end. I've waited a week to see whether any members of the pontificating classes take any further interest in the inquest held in Milton Keynes last Friday. No luck.

It's a whole seven days ago, but you may dimly remember it. The deputy coroner, Thomas Osborne, denounced the understaffing in the maternity unit at Milton Keynes General hospital as "nothing short of scandalous" and undertook to write to ministers about it.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC), which regulates NHS performance and has had MK General under scrutiny for a while, piled in to condemn the hospital's failure to improve sufficiently since a similar incident in 2007.

Newspapers across the political spectrum duly went into outrage mode.

But hang on a minute: there is a shortage of midwives. The government has been trying for years to train and recruit more – 3,400 whole-time equivalents by 2012, to be precise. The Royal College of Midwives says that won't be enough.

A cyclical shortage has been intensified by the unexpected rise in the UK birth rate, something we should put to one side here because there are management issues hampering staff at MK General.

What with home births, natural births and underwater births, we, the customers, don't help either, and governments let us get away with wasting public money in the name of such choices.

Only the other week, a level-headed 40-something woman I know and like insisted on a home birth even though she'd spent years desperately trying to get pregnant.

Here was probably her only chance to become a mother, and she risked it all on a home birth. Utter folly, from which friends could not dissuade her. She was lucky; all went well.

Not so for the McCall family at MK General. From what I can piece together from the Guardian report and other newspaper accounts, Amanda McCall was admitted to hospital on 8 May, pregnant with a full-term baby, suffering from swelling pains.

The Guardian reported that she told the inquest she had agreed to a planned induction after meeting a consultant.

An induction was offered to ease the pain, but she asked for a caesarian section and was told (says the Times report) that such operations are only done at night in an emergency.

Quite right, too' they are complicated and expensive. I've seen one. As the seasonal joke goes, nowadays Christ himself would have been induced on the 24th.

McCall went into labour naturally that night, but her baby's heartbeat became erratic and an emergency section was carried out after all. Ebony was born at 3.21am, but died 14 minutes later.

Had McCall's mother, Breda, pressed the panic button five minutes sooner, the baby might have been saved, hard-pressed staff reportedly told her. Hence the inquest, hence the fuss, hence the hospital's abject apology and the CQC's official statement.

What I haven't told you yet is that McCall was 17 at the time. She has one kidney and "suffered medical conditions including cardiac disease", according to reports.

You might say that warranted closer attention by the hospital and a consultant-led delivery. I might say: what's a 17-year-old, with a clearly loving and supportive family around her, doing having a baby at all?

There may be a good answer to my question, though it would have to be pretty good to persuade me. Children shouldn't be having children.

No husband or teenage boyfriend features in the media account, but McCall's grandfather, Terry, offers his thoughts in this BBC clip, which you may find illuminating.

There's a bigger picture here. As with criminal cases and schools, so with the NHS – the public service gets the stick for evident shortcomings based on excessive demands by customers, patients, parents, criminals etc.

It happens a lot, and the Daily Beast is full of sob stories in which the real villain of the piece is often the complainant – the Beast's reader, whom it is predictably reluctant to condemn.

In this instance, a girl of 17 should not have been pregnant. That's a matter of family honour, too.

And as for wider society – now that we've got to pay off the bankers' binge, we won't be able to afford sloppy morals in quite the way we've been doing lately.